He spent time on movie sets as a kid, before his mother’s manager decided he was too distracting—Tory blamed the manager entirely when she gave up custody.
He did throw a rock at his mom during shooting when he was four or five, an out-of-character act of defiance. A seamstress with a dirty tan and bleached hair was assigned to take him to a burger joint. He cried, and she gave him two ice-cream sundaes, and he stared at them, dumbfounded, while she smoked. Two! she kept saying. You can have two. Look at you. You’ve got two sundaes, sugar. Her voice throaty and gruff. He could see the dark oyster pearls of her molar fillings when she yawned. He ate both and threw up.
His favorite people on those sets were the animal handler, Dominic, and his collie, Starlight, good memories in a sea of strange ones. Dominic told stories about wild hogs in Texas and a church burning in Vermont.
Jamey was an extra too. He had a speaking part in Bad Hand. He’s the kid at the gas station when Lorraine and Jessup are on the run. Jamey’s character says: Hey mister, where’d you get such a fast car? and his mom’s character, Lorraine, says to Jessup: Jess, let’s go. We can’t be wasting time. But when the Shelby Cobra peels out in a storm of dirt, Lorraine forlornly watches the boy from the car window, as if she already knows how the story ends.
MAY 1986
May’s unrelenting rain paints a sheen on houses, daffodils, cars in the slick streets, umbrellas. Everyone at Yale is finishing exams, barely sleeping, coming apart, wearing shirts inside out, and staring into space.
Jamey decides to finish the year as right as possible. He runs across campus in the monsoon, handing in papers, his hair wet—a messenger delivering well-intentioned and pointless letters.
The sun shines onto graduation, making a rainbow over the lawn. Mosquitoes arise from fountains and birdbaths and rooftop lakes. He and other underclassmen slouch on the sidelines, with button-downs rolled up at the sleeves, to watch the ceremony. Students in black gowns sweat, standing in the bright yard as the speaker tells them they are the future, they are the great minds of their generation, they will steward grace and dignity and knowledge into modern society.
Which may be true of many graduates, but Jamey looks at some of the people he knows best in this crowd: Andrew Chesterton, who tried to fuck a drunk, unconscious girl last weekend in a Volvo parked behind his house; Molly Easley, who has a two-hundred-dollar-a-day cocaine habit; and Brady Fitzgerald, who shoved half a frozen bagel up Jacob Murotzky’s ass in a hazing ritual.
He tries to fish the word greatness out of his brain like a fly from milk but it sticks to the glass.
Restless, Elise takes Buck out. He walks without a leash, already loyal, and glares at anyone who gets close—his black snout seems sinister, but he wouldn’t bite unless someone strikes first.
She throws him a tennis ball on empty basketball courts, sometimes until dusk, stopping because suddenly they can’t see each other.
She likes the mystery of that changeover, those fifteen minutes of sundown when the streets and trees and people and parked cars are delicate and immediate, every sound and smell and movement amplified by the lowest light or the lightest darkness. Even a city that’s broken and dirty can, in that time, be divine and intimate.
Elise and Jamey eat breakfast at the diner, rain pinging on the metal roof. Her sweatshirt tag stands up, and her hoops dangle as she reads the menu.
“Yeah, I’m leaving in a week and a half,” Jamey finally says.
“That soon?” Elise asks, as if she’s been thinking of anything else.
They’re both weirdly formal.
“So, what is your plan?” he asks, using the side of his fork on his pancakes.
“Well, the lease is up end of May. Robbie’s headed to Miami, Caspar hooked him up with a hotel job.”
“Are you renewing the lease?”
“Nah. Can’t afford it. I might not stay in New Haven,” she says. “I dunno.”
“Where would you go?”
She shrugs. “Anywhere but home.”
“You have money saved?”
“You’re fucking hilarious.”
“What if you end up without a place to live?” Jamey asks.
She laughs, but not meanly, swipes egg bits with a long-nailed finger to lick. “What would you do if you had no roof, and you had no money?” she asks. “You’d figure shit out.”
“Me?”
“Where would you sleep?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Everybody has to sleep.”
“I’d find a park,” he says, amused. “Sleep on a bench.”
“Where everyone can see? Cops see you? Sleep under the bushes. Until you make friends.”
Silence.
“Have you slept under bushes?” he asks.
“Oh my God,” she says, annoyed, and drains her orange juice.
He puts money on the table and gets up, does a fake yawn-and-stretch to seem casual, his shirt rising to show hip.
Of course he thinks about inviting her to New York City this summer. He dreads being alone in the downtown loft a family friend is letting him use, but he can’t combine her world with his, for her sake. Gasoline and fire.
When he thinks about asking, he gets woozy, like a kid who can’t see the road over a dashboard.
He should use this natural juncture for farewell. But if she lived with him (tucked away—a secret playmate), the summer could be different.
When did I get so creepy? he wonders.
“Why don’t you come with me for a few weeks?” he says one night, turning off the light and getting under the sheets.
Did I just say that? He’s instantly high like he sucked helium.
“To New York?” her voice asks in the dark.
“Yeah. I’m staying downtown. Working at an auction house.”
“What’s that?”
“They sell people’s belongings.”
“We call that a pawn shop, brother.”
“What options do you have?” his voice asks, and he feels too aggressive.
Elise grins but he can’t see. Her voice is quiet: “Of course I’ll fucking come with you.”
When Jamey was little, he was driven alone in a limo from the Hamptons to the city, or vice versa, and he’d look up, and there was always some kid on the overpass above the LIE, face pressed into the fence, crude blue sun streaming around her silhouette.
He was afraid of those kids—or threatened—not for what they could do to him. They couldn’t touch him, let alone see behind his smoked windows. It’s that he thought they knew things and he knew nothing. He was star-struck by how sad they were, how little they had, what they went through, what they saw.
And now he’s opening the limousine door wide, patting the leather seat.
Elise and Robbie go dancing at the Anvil one last night.